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Come Sunday, ‘if there’re seasons…’ will come to an end. For me, one who has watched exactly one other local Chinese theatre show for as long as I can remember, this experience is surprisingly blithe.

Strung together by the words of Raymond To and the poetry turned songs of Liang Wern Fook, what stays behind this carefully crafted story is the poetry behind the songs and the energy brought forth by the synergy of the ensemble cast. George Chan is a terrific actor- powerful and charismatic, and his two leading ladies, demised and corruptible stand tall. I only knew Sing Chew as a contestant of some reality show before this and have grown to like her for her quiet intensity and strong emotional performance on stage. She is known to cry as she sings.

i have always found musicals to be a little amusing, a tad strange. People dont burst out singing in real life. But i dont find ’seasons’ awakward at all. In ‘Seasons’, singing becomes a  retreat into one’s inner psyche for rememberance, for healing, for hurting. Predictably, we dont avoid pain for obvious reasons. there is a maytr in everyone and pining for love lost can be both an antagonising process and one that is refreshingly carthatic. Pain can bring forth a sense of awakening, a much needed punch to the head clouded with self induced pity. Pain enables us to dwell in the beauty of tragic unattainable love and bring us out of the self-dug abyss.

Biased i may be but i think that ‘if there’re seasons…’ can be the quinessential singaporean musical. We dwellers of an island nation with sun bleached skin pine for the transitions offered by the changing of the seasons- hot summers, melancholic autumns, romantic wintry months followed by the rejuvenating power of spring. If there’re seasons, some of us may never leave these shores. But the hot tropical sun and torrid monsoon rains will always welcome us back wetting and scorching the ‘welcome home’ mat in tandem.